Abstract
Chapter 1 examines how Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death invokes the workings of history and memory to create a narrative of suffocation, where the desires of narrating the past smash up against the “continuing present (that arcs toward an unpredictable future)” of drama. In effect, Danton’s Death is a lamentation on unrealized possibilities and lost opportunities, and the very contradictory nature of dramatizing the past reinforces these almost oxymoronic abstractions. The effectual and ineffectual functions of memory (and it will become the dream for Strindberg many years later) that collapse the past and hopes for the future into a precarious present are exposed only to be forgotten and taken to the grave with the death of Danton. For Büchner, in Danton’s Death, the failure to remember—that is, the failure of memory and the failure of history to remember—becomes the failure to seize an opportunity; or in another sense, past unrealized hopes for the future become the future’s desire for its present.
Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the Central New York Conference on Language and Literature (2004) and at the International Federation for Theatre Research Conference (2005).
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Notes
Abraham-Joseph Bénard Fleury, Memoirs, 2:398, quoted and trans. in Carlson, Theatre of the French Revolution, 244. Fleury was a French actor of the Comédie-Française before, during, and after the French Revolution. He was imprisoned for a time as an antirevolutionary.
Büchner, Danton’s Death, 64.
Knezevic, “Marked with Red Ink,” 407.
Attilio Favorini offers a clear etymology of “history” and “memory” in his article “History, Collective Memory, and Aeschylus,” 99–111.
He writes
Mnema and its cognates are associated with the faculty of memory and memorial objects, while historia is sometimes used as a synonym with logos or narrative, and a historian is called a suggrapheus (one who writes down facts), a logographos, or a logopoios, as well as a historikos. Mnemonsyne or memory, or course, is the mother of the Muses because before the invention of writing, memory was the poet’s chief gift. That Clio the Muse of history is one of memory’s offspring offers a mythological foundation for the generation of history out of memory. (99)
I am quoting Joseph Donohue’s conception of the tense of drama, which he repeated in many “Modern American Drama” lectures at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Büchner, Danton’s Death, 64.
See Rokem, “Narratives of Armed Conflict,” 555–573. Aptly explaining how “history has become the tragedy itself,” Rokem describes repetition in both history and theatre by commenting on Fortinbras’ command, “Go bid the soldiers shoot,” in Hamlet: “The ‘agains’ of history, with the events from which it constituted—the command to shoot that is apparently repeated in every generation—have merged with the ghosts of tragedy that will in various ways appear on the stage tonight” (559).
Müller, “Identity, Paradox, Difference,” 525–526.
Büchner, Danton’s Death, 28.
Ibid. 28.
Ibid. 51.
Ibid. 54.
Ibid. 54–55.
Ibid. 55.
Ibid. 55.
Ibid. 56.
Ibid. 108.
Ibid. 27.
Ibid. 46–47.
Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, 15.
Büchner, Danton’s Death, 28.
Ibid. 108.
This idea, of course, comes from the idea that there is a “consciousness of doubleness” in performance, according to Richard Bauman, and quoted and explained in detail by Marvin Carlson: see Carlson, Performance, 6.
Büchner, Danton’s Death, 91.
Smith, “Narrating the Guillotine,” 27–29.
Ibid. 29–31. “In a sequence of path-breaking, passion-filled debates in May and June 1791 it was decided, against fierce opposition, to retain the death penalty, but in a form compatible with the new spirit of the age. While the ancient régime had allowed class distinctions to be demonstrated in the application of death (nobles were beheaded with a sword, commoners hung), under the new laws each person would die in exactly the same, egalitarian way” (ibid. 32).
Ibid. 33–34.
Ibid. 37–40.
Ibid. 45–46.
Büchner, Danton’s Death, 35.
Wirth, “Thrust Stage as Guillotine,” 60–61.
Halperin-Royer, “Robert Wilson and the Actor,” 320.
Ibid. 328.
Kelly, Review of Danton’s Death, 375.
Ibid. 377.
Devenyi, “Consciousness and Structure,” 43.
Ibid.
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© 2013 Michael Y. Bennett
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Bennett, M.Y. (2013). Danton’s Memory: Structural Impossibilities in Büchner’s Danton’s Death. In: Narrating the Past through Theatre: Four Crucial Texts. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137275424_2
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